Simplifying the Welfare Quality® assessment protocol for broiler chicken welfare

Area of Science:

• Animal Welfare Science
• Livestock Production Systems
• Veterinary Public Health

Background:

• The Welfare Quality® (WQ) assessment protocol uses animal-based measures for welfare evaluation.
• Stakeholders require reduced assessment time for improved practical applicability.
• Existing protocols may contain calculation errors needing correction.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate time reduction potential for the WQ broiler assessment protocol.
• To propose and evaluate protocol modifications and simplification strategies.
• To correct errors in original WQ protocol calculations.

Main Methods:

• Data from 180 on-farm and 150 slaughter plant broiler flock assessments were analyzed.
• Correlation analysis identified relationships between welfare indicators for simplification.
• Two strategies were developed: predicting on-farm gait scores from hock burn, and substituting on-farm measures with slaughter plant data.

Main Results:

• Strategy 1 (predicting gait scores from hock burn) could reduce on-farm assessment time by ~1 hour (25-33%).
• Strategy 2 (using slaughter plant data) could reduce on-farm assessment time by ~2 hours (50-67%).
• Both strategies showed close agreement with the full protocol, but with large confidence intervals for specificity.

Conclusions:

• Proposed simplification strategies for the WQ broiler protocol are promising for reducing assessment time.
• Strategy 1 and Strategy 2 offer significant time savings, enhancing practical applicability.
• Further validation and testing across diverse welfare categories are recommended for both strategies.